Another year, another holiday.  Bukowski pretty much summed it up.  It’s not that you’re depressed, it’s just… as a man who’s seen this revolving door 63 times now, you tend to get a little ho-hum about it.  What are we even celebrating, Santa?  Freedom?

Regardless, the music is both a blessing and a curse.  Every year I have these moments of inspiration from hearing Christmas music, and also a little dread.  This year I made a playlist for doo wop, and that was just the right fix.  It has the universality of the holidays, but it’s soulful.  If you listen closely to the actual background voices and realize they are often facilitating instruments that, from the street-corners of their inception were beyond a financial or social grasp to these young groups… it’s really quite something.  This music inspired The Beatles and so much more.

In 1978, on one of the first tours with Moon Martin to New York City, we were being driven from the airport to our hotel by a driver with a strong Brooklyn accent.  There was an old 50’s song on the radio, then another and another until I finally asked “what is this station?”.  He replied, “This?  Yeah man it’s a doo wop station!  The greatest, right?”

For me it was more than the greatest.  It was an out of body experience.  The music of The Dells, The Capris, The Flamingos… one after another playing with the skyline of Manhattan coming into view.  It was turning dusk, and the boys in the band wanted to go venture around… see a few things, maybe get a bite.

However, I opted to stay in my room overlooking old time fire escapes with the bedside radio on, playing doo wop.  I was frozen in time.  Not the present, but a time I felt I had been here before.  It’s one of the only feelings of this I’ve ever had, but a strong one.

And to this day, at certain times… like this year, it’s medicine.  I devoted an entire record to this era and genre called Coolerator which is on Spotify, Apple Music and the rest.  I tried my level best to use equipment from that time, perform and mix the record with the same sensibility.  It’s more of an homage than anything I really felt like promoting… but I have to say of all my records, it’s my most frequent listen.

This and my Spotify doo-wop playlist links below.  Merry Merry. Happy Happy 🙂